Explanation of-ode-to-nightingale

M.A English (Literature and Linguistic)

1. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
 The speaker says that his heart hurts as if he has just drunken poison.
 "Hemlock" is the poison that the Greek philosopher Socrates took when he was put to
death for corrupting the youth.
 The speaker feels woozy and numb, like when the dentist puts you on Novocain. Imagine
him swaying back and forth, kind of drunk and out of it.
 The "ache" in his heart almost sounds pleasurable, the way he describes it. Like when
you hear a sad song you really love that just pierces your heart, and you're like, "This
makes me so sad!" but if anyone tried to turn it off you'd throttle them. Like that.
Lines 3-4
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
 OK, so maybe "poison" is a bit exaggerated. He's not dying, after all. He tries another
approach to explain how he feels.
 He feels as though he has drank some powerful drug or painkiller ("opiate") that causes
him to "sink" into a kind of oblivion.
 In Greek mythology, "Lethe" was a river in Hades (the Underworld) that made people
forget all their memories if they drank from it.
 There's really no way to dance around it: the speaker is comparing his feeling to being
totally strung out on drugs.
 "Opium" is a powerful drug made from the poppy flower, and it was all the rage among
certain adventurous types in the 19th century. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for
example, was an opium addict, as was the writer Thomas de Quincy, who wrote an essay
titled, "Confessions of an Opium Eater." This was before people discovered just how
toxic opium is for the body.
Lines 5-6
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
 Now we know that the speaker must be addressing the nightingale of the title.
 He wants to clarify that the pain he feels is not because he is jealous of the bird's
happiness. Instead, he is excessively happy for the bird's happiness. He's like that friend
who bursts into tears when you share really good news and cries, "I'm just . . . so . . .
happy . . . for you!" — but you're not sure if they are really happy for you or just sad for
themselves.
Lines 7-10

2. That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
 And why is the nightingale so happy? Because it gets to sit in the trees all day and sing
about summertime. It's to the trees what Jimmy Buffet is to the beach (hey-ya!).
 The nightingale is not a large bird, and it can fly, which seems like enough grounds to
call it "light-winged" (which is pronounced with three syllables, by the way).
 And in Greek mythology, a "dryad" is a nymph (female spirit) that lives in the trees.
 The bird makes whatever space or "plot" it inhabits "melodious," and this particular plot
seems to have beech trees, giving it a "beechen green" color.
 The nightingale doesn't hold back. It sings with a "full throat," like an opera singer in a
solo. We imagine that this poem takes place in the peak of summer.
Lines 11-12
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
 The speaker longs for a drink of wine or some other spirit that has been kept cool deep in
the earth. "Vintage" wine is made from grapes from the same harvest, and people often
refer to a particular year at a winery as a "vintage."
 We have no explanation at this point for his sudden desire to get his drink on. He wants
wine to just start bubbling up out of the ground, as if you could stick a tap right into the
soil and let the good times flow.
 Good wine needs to be kept cool, which is why people often store it in their cellars.
According to Keats, the earth is like a giant wine cellar.
Lines 13-14
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
 Well, that makes sense. If you drink wine out of the earth, it's no surprise that it might
taste like flowers ("Flora") and plants ("country green").
 People sometimes jokingly say they want to "squeeze every last drop" out of the day, but
the speaker seems to mean it literally.
 Not only does the earth's wine taste like flowers, but it also tastes like dancing, song, and
happiness ("sunburnt mirth"). Specifically, he is thinking of "Provencal," a region in the
south of France known for its wine, sun, and a kind of poetic song known as "Troubadour
poetry." Many Troubadours wrote poems addressed to an unattainable lover.
Lines 15-16

3. O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
 The speaker wants to stick the south of France, or just the South in general, into a bottle
("beaker") and guzzle the whole thing down! He wants to distill the earth down to its
powerful, intoxicating essence.
 It's like when you go to the beach and wish you could just bottle the breezy ocean air to
take back with you to school or the office.
 "Hippocrene" is a reference that there is no reason you should know – Keats is showing
off his knowledge of Greek mythology again.
 Hippocrene is the "fountain of the Muses," a group of eight women (again, in Greek
mythology) who inspire struggling poets. The fountain bubbles up out of the earth where
Pegasus, the famous flying horse, is supposed to have dug his hoof into the ground.
 He wants to drink something that will make him a great poet…and that'll get him drunk.
The liquid from the Hippocrene is "blushful" because it is reddish, the color of both wine
and a blush.
Lines 17-18
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
 In delicious detail, the speaker describes the appearance of the wine. It has little bubbles
at that burst, or "wink," at the brim of the beaker, like little eyes.
 It also stains your mouth purple when you drink it, like any strong red wine will do.
Lines 19-20
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
 What does all this talk about wine, inspiration, and drunkenness have to do with the
nightingale? What happened to that old bird, anyhow?
 The speaker sums up his intentions in these final two lines of the stanza.
 He wants to get drunk on this magical wine so that he can leave the "world" without
anyone noticing and just "fade" into the dark forest with the nightingale.
 But isn't the forest part of the "world"? Apparently not. By "world" he might mean the
world of human society, work, responsibility, and all that. The nightingale lives apart
from this world.
 Putting aside all this business about Provencal and Hippocrene, the speaker wants to
drink for the same reason many people drink: to forget his problems for a while and to
have a more carefree state of mind.
Lines 21-22

4. Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
 If this were a movie, now would be the part when the screen gets all blurry, a harp starts
playing, and the dream sequence begins.
 The speaker dreams of "fading" out of the world, of just disappearing in a very quiet way.
 He wants to forget about those things that the nightingale has never had to worry about.
Again, we don't know much about which things he means specifically, but we assume
they must have to do with the stresses and cares of living in human society.
 The bird is free of such cares.
Lines 23-24
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
 Wait, this is supposed to be a dream sequence: why is he talking about these depressing
things? It seems just he just can't leave the world behind.
 The world is full of tired and "weary" people, sickness ("fever"), and massive stress
("fret"). He reduces all of society down to one depressingly exaggerated image: people
sitting around and listen to each other "groan" and complain.
 That's a pretty bleak view of the world, but it just goes to show how much of an effect the
nightingale has had on him. Compared to the nightingale's carefree song, our voices
sound like groans.
Lines 25-26
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
 He decides to take the whole depressing images thing to a new level, describing the world
as a place where the uncontrollable movements of illness shake the "last gray hairs" on a
dying man's head. Palsy is a disease the causes sudden involuntary movements, and so
this gray-hair person is no long capable of controlling his own body.
 He's also almost bald.
 In this section, Keats confronts one of his favorite enemies: time. After you read this
poem, check out the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in which he tries magically to stop time.
 Time is the speaker's enemy because it causes young and beautiful people to turn old,
"pale," thin as a ghost, and, eventually, dead as a doornail.
 Put simply, time = death, death = bad, so time = bad.
Lines 27-28
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

5.  The world is a place where any kind of thinking leads to depressing thoughts and worries.
There are no thoughts that can ultimately bring joy or peace: thinking itself is the
problem.
 These sad and "despairing" thoughts make your eyelid like lead weights. You have
trouble just staying awake and conscious during the day. The world totally wears people
down and tires them out.
Lines 29-30
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
 The speaker continues to explain why the world of human time is such a bad place.
Neither Beauty nor Love can survive there for long.
 Beauty loses her glowing ("lustrous") eyes, probably when they become "leaden" from
depressed thoughts. Or maybe just from old age.
 And new Love cannot fawn ("pine") over Beauty's eyes once they have lost their luster.
Love is fickle like that, and, as anyone who has ever been through junior high school
knows, it often doesn't last "beyond to-morrow."
Lines 31-32
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
 All this thinking about how depressing the world is makes the speaker think, "Get me
outta here!" He needs to hatch an escape plan.
 He wants fly away to join the nightingale in its refuge from the world. But he knows that
the booze isn't going to take him. He can't rely on Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, or any
of Bacchus's buddies ("pards"), which is what he wanted earlier in the poem.
Lines 33-34
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
 Instead of wine, he's going to fly on the wings of his own poetry. Poetry's wings are
invisible, or "viewless."
 He's hopeful that poetry will take him to the nightingale's world even though his brain is
not so helpful in making the trip. His brain confuses him and slows him down.
Lines 35-36

6. Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
 And, the, all of a sudden, he's with the nightingale. How did that happen? Count us
slightly suspicious of how he can be "already with" the bird, even though he just
complained about how his brain was such a big roadblock.
 One possibility is that he joins the nightingale in his dreams, because the imagery in this
section is associated with darkness and night.
 He is in the kingdom of the night, which is soft and "tender," and the moon is visible in
the sky. The imagery is more fanciful and imaginative here.
 The phrase "tender is the night" was made famous by the American writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald, who used it as the title of one of his novels. (To find out more about what it's
about, check out our Shmoop guide to Tender is the Night.)
Lines 37-40
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
 The moon is surrounded by her attendants ("fays"), the stars. Despite all these sources of
light, there is no light in the nightingale's world beyond what filters down through the
trees.
 What he is really describing in this complicated-sounding line is the fact that the
nightingale lives in the forest, where trees block the light. "Verdurous glooms," just
means the darkness that is caused by plants getting in the way of the moon.
 Still, the nightingale's home sounds like a magical place, something out of a fairy tale.
Lines 41-42
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
 The speaker remains in the nightingale's nighttime world. (Get it? The night-ingale's
home is the night? Keats, you're so clever!)
 Without light, the speaker can't see the flowers on the forest floor or the plants that
produce that pleasant smell ("soft incense") in the trees. (We don't know if he's talking
about the trees themselves or something that grows on them...)
Lines 43-46
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows

7. The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
 Marco! Polo! The speaker is still groping around in the dark, but he's having fun.
 Because he can't see, he has to guess what "sweet" flowers and plants he smells, which
depends on what month it is. It's a delicious guessing game.
 The darkness is "embalmed," where "balm" is a sweet-smelling substance like a perfume.
 He's guessing all kinds of different plants: "Grass!' "Fruit tree!" "Wait, wait, I know this
one: white hawthorn! No, it's eglantine!"
 Or maybe he smells all of them at once, like a bouquet.
Lines 47-50
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
 The speaker names more plants that he smells in the darkness. He also begins listing
things that he can hear. This section all relates to the experience of being alone in a dark
– but not a frightening – forest.
 He sees violets, a summer flower, and the musk rose, a flower that blooms in May. The
dew of the musk rose is intoxicating, like the wine he spoke of earlier.
 He hears the sound of flies on a summer evening.
 In short, he seems to experience both spring and summer at the same time, which tells us
that we have left the world of strict reality. As Dorothy might say, we're not in Kansas
anymore.
Lines 51-52
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
 The stanzas in this poem actually connect seamlessly. At the end of stanza 5, the speaker
moved from smells to sounds. Now he says that he is listening in the darkness.
 The experience of being alone in the dark seems related to the experience of death, and
he thinks maybe death wouldn't be so bad. "This is easy," he thinks. "I could get used to
this."
 Death would be another way to free himself of all his worldly cares. Maybe he's
confusing death for sitting on a beach in Barbados….
Lines 53-54
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

8.  This is turning into a love story between the speaker and death. The speaker whispers
sweet nothings to death. And by whisper we mean, "writes rhyming poetry about." Yeah.
 It's true: Keats was obsessed with the idea of death, and he often wrote about it.
 Line 54 is mysterious: we think it means either that he wants death to take the air from
his lungs, or that the air takes his breath along with his verses.
Lines 55-56
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
 He's really quite taken with this death idea. While in the world of the nightingale, he
thinks it would be "rich to die." Many people are afraid that death will be empty, but
richness is associated with an abundance of good things, which is almost the opposite of
emptiness.
 He'd like to go out quietly, in the middle of the night. He'd just stop existing: "cease."
 This part of the poem is kind of creepy, because Keats did die very young.
Lines 57-58
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
 He wants to die at midnight, while listening to the nightingale singing.
 We were wondering what happened to the nightingale. He seems to forget about the
nightingale at the beginning of the stanzas and then return to it at the end, as if he
suddenly remembered: "Oh, right: this is supposed to be a poem about a bird!"
 The nightingale is kind of like a poet, sending its voice into the air just as Keats sends his
rhyme into the air. The bird's music expresses its "soul." Birds have souls? This one does.
 The bird is completely lost in the moment of pure joy and "ecstasy."
Lines 59-60
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
 He imagines what would happen after the moment of his death. Basically, the bird would
keep singing as if nothing had happened.
 The speaker would still have "ears," of course: or at least. his corpse would. But the ears
would be useless ("vain") because there is no brain to process the sounds.
 The bird would be then singing a "high requiem," a kind of church service with music
sung for a dead person. Lots of classical musicians have composed amazing requiems,
like Mozart, but we'd bet the nightingale probably doesn't know it is singing one.
 And neither would the speaker, of course. By that point, he'd just be an inanimate object,
like a piece of grassy soil or "sod

9. Lines 61-62
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
 He thinks that the nightingale must be immortal: it can't die. (Someone needs to buy him
a book on biology.)
 Being immortal, the nightingale is not followed by future generations, which are
metaphorically "hungry" in that they take the place of their parents. This is a very
pessimistic view of the cycle of life. Basically, the younger folks are hunting down their
own parents to run them off the planet.
Lines 63-64
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
 Oh, OK, so he doesn't necessarily mean that each nightingale is immortal. He means that
the nightingale's voice is immortal, because all nightingales produce the same beautiful,
haunting sound.
 His talk of generations leads him to think of human history.
 Emperors and clowns in the old days listened to the same voice of the nightingale that he
hears now How old? The reference to emperors makes us think of Ancient Rome. Keats
was an Italian buff.
Lines 65-67
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
 The speaker moves slightly further back through history, from Imperial Rome (we think)
to the Old Testament of the Bible (also known as the Hebrew Bible).
 The Book of Ruth is one of the lesser-known books in the Hebrew Bible. The story goes
that Ruth married a guy and moved to a new country. Then her husband died, and Ruth's
mother-in-law told her to return home and get married again. But Ruth was like, "I'm
totally loyal to you and can't leave you." She supports her mother-in-law by working in
the fields of this (to her) completely strange and random place. Eventually she finds a
new husband. The end.
 Keats imagines that Ruth heard the nightingale's song while she was working in the fields
in this foreign or "alien" place, and it caused her to start weeping. We wish we had more
info on why exactly he chose this story: it's a curious reference!
Lines 68-70

10. The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
 He notes another time that the nightingale's song might have been heard. But now he has
left regular human history all together in favor of fantasy.
 A "casement" is either a normal case or a window that opens on a hinge. The speaker
thinks the nightingale's song has "charmed" a casement on a ship, and the casement
opens. Somehow "magic" is involved, but we think Keats is just using words that conjure
up the images of fantasy.
 The nightingale flies out the window and over the open ocean. There is an air of danger:
this is no regular ocean. It is the ocean surrounding a fantasy world or "faery land."
 Keats might be thinking of the stories of knights, fairies, and monsters from Edmund
Spenser's famous Renaissance poem, The Faerie Queene.
 After it flies out the window, the nightingale is alone and abandoned – "forlorn" – in this
strange land
Lines 71-72
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
 Oh, no! Why did he have to use the word "forlorn?" It reminds the speaker of how he has
also been abandoned – by the nightingale itself.
 All of a sudden, he gets sucked back into the normal world after several pleasant stanzas
of exploring the nightingale's realm.
 For him, the word "forlorn" is like, when you are having a really great dream and then all
of a sudden you hear your alarm clock and remember that you have to wake up and go to
class. It's a big disappointment.
 The speaker is pulled back into his own mind, his "sole self."
Lines 73-74
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
 He admits that his attempts to use his imagination ("fancy") to "cheat" his way into the
nightingale's world have not been as effective as he would have liked. He bids good-bye
to the bird and then lashes out at his imagination for being a "deceiving elf," like the
character Puck from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
 Although "fancy" is famed for being able to create new worlds, the speaker has not been
successful at permanently escaping the everyday world.
Lines 75-78

11. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
 Now it becomes clear that the nightingale is flying away.
 The speaker bids goodbye twice more to the nightingale using the French word, "adieu,"
which means, "good-bye for a long time."
 The bird's sad or "plaintive" song grows harder to hear, as the bird flies from the nearby
meadows, across a stream, up a hill, and into the next valley. Now he can't hear it at all.
Lines 79-80
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
 Now that the bird is left, the speaker's not sure if he ever entered its world at all. He
thinks that maybe the experience was just a "waking dream" and not really true.
 But has the speaker returned to the "real" world? Maybe the nightingale's world was
reality, and the "real" world is just a dream.
 Everything is topsy-turvy, and he doesn't know what is true from what is fancy. He
wonders if he is a awake or sleeping.